Brent on the Internet

Saturday, August 5, 2017

Trust is a crucial part of our society. We trust other drivers on the road not to
crash into our cars, and we trust restaurant workers to not spit in our
food. We do this even though these types
of incidents occur regularly all over the world.[i] We retain our trust in these two situations because
the rate of these negative occurrences is negligible for such mundane, every
day activities. Not only that, but it is
easy for us to believe that most others on the road are reasonably competent
drivers and we trust that they have some sense of self preservation. Similarly, it is safe to assume that any
restaurant manager would quickly punish a worker caught spitting in customers'
food. These are only two simple examples
of every day trust, but without it society cannot function.

What is interesting to consider is the concept of an anonymous
restaurant worker who able to spit in food with impunity, with there being no
effective way for a customer or management to identity or track them down. The onset of the Information Age has allowed
for the conceptual anonymous restaurant worker to come to life, albeit in a
digital world. Today, the Internet is a
playground to hordes of users acting anonymously, doing things they wouldn’t
otherwise do if their identities were known.
They have made things such as illegal hacking, fake news, and
cyberbullying commonplace. This is
because through anonymity, they are not subject to many of what Bruce Schneier,
in his 2012 book Liars & Outliers, calls “societal pressures.”[ii] He explains that there are four types of
societal pressures that build and maintain trust in society: moral pressure, relating
to our innate personal sense of wrong and right; reputational pressure, relating
to how others in society respond to and judge our actions; institutional
pressure, relating to the established rules, laws, norms, and customs of a
given group; and security systems, technical or procedural mechanisms that
prevent unwanted behavior. Of these,
only one is capable of effectively combating the negative impacts of anonymous
internet usage – security systems. If
the Internet is to become fully ingrained and integrated into society, new
security policy and technologies must be put in place to limit anonymous action
online and ensure that the required level of societal trust is maintained.

In terms of trust, it is easy to see how our online and
offline lives are at odds with each other.
Because a high degree of trust is something that is required for society
to function, the Internet in its current form will continue to make a negative
social impact. Outside of the Internet,
anonymity is the exception. In normal
day-to-day life, we are expected to carry identification with us, put license
plates on our cars, and have addresses on our homes. By default, our actions in the world are not
anonymous, unless action is taken to ensure otherwise. A common example of which would be to put on
a ski mask to hide one's identity – an action generally regarded as bad, not
trustworthy, and dissuaded through traditional societal pressures.

Supporters of anonymity online would argue that it provides
a freedom of expression -- freedom to create content on the Internet without burden
of taking responsibility for it.
Further, supporters may argue that a middle ground, pseudo-anonymity, can
provide the best of both words.
Pseudo-anonymity enables this freedom while also maintaining, through
back-end technical means, a link to an actual identity. The purported benefit
is that a user’s identity can be known for possible law enforcement reasons, but
also at the same time creates an illusion of anonymity for the general user
population. At the end of the day,
online anonymity comes at a huge expense to our government[iii],
which is forced to constantly surveil the entire network, capturing and storing
vast amounts of data to try and maintain a system of trust. Despite this huge cost and effort there are remain
relatively easy ways to maintain anonymity online. And a lot of damage has been done to our
society due to the anonymous nature of the Internet. Examples of this include the weaponization of
social media by terrorist organizations[iv],
fake media outlets unreasonably swaying popular decision making[v],
and negatively influencing society's already lackluster appreciation of the
truth[vi]. We would be naive to think that this societal
damage has not been made possible by the anonymity afforded by the Internet.

But what can be done?
After all, from a technological perspective, from its foundation the
network has always catered to those who wish to remain anonymous. The answer is security systems -- the only
one of Schneier's societal pressures that be put in place to help prevent
anonymous activity online. Some
Internet services, a great example of which being Facebook, have done an
admirable job of working to reduce the amount of anonymous user activity. By taking strides to enforce a one-to-one
relationship between a user of the system and an actual person, people are held
accountable for what they say and do online – law enforcement using Facebook to
solve crimes is an almost every day occurrence.[vii] However, the Facebook model is incomplete
because, through allowing linked content from outside services, they have
exposed users to one of the worst aspects of anonymity online and helped to
create a media-fueled divisive culture[viii]. What is instead needed is the inverse of the
current trust paradigm of the Internet: legislation from our leaders that
enforces a one-to-one identification at the network level. What this means is that as soon as a user is
connected to the network, their identity should be known and maintained. Personal identification would be the default
on the Internet, not the other way around.
While this model could also allow for anonymity within certain spheres –
services which allow users to share content pseudo-anonymously -- the
overarching trust of the Internet would be maintained by enabling the other
societal pressures. After all, as
Schneier writes, “We humans are a social species, and more often than not
someone is watching. And that makes an
enormous difference.”

[i]
Over a million people die in road crashes every year (http://asirt.org/initiatives/informing-road-users/road-safety-facts/road-crash-statistics)

Monday, July 31, 2017

It is
generally known that the internet has revolutionized almost every aspect of
society. Access to the internet has
become just as ubiquitous as the telephone – common in everyday use. While this use, for many people, simply means
the ability to socialize with friends or get some shopping done quickly, the
internet also, and more importantly, fuels digital innovation. It does this chiefly by enabling new
combinations of technologies. The Waze phone app combines GPS and social
media to provide the best possible driving routes. Yelp combines GPS and restaurant reviews to
help a traveler quickly find a great place to eat – and then provide real-time
driving directions. Google Assistance
pairs artificial intelligence and a mobile phone camera to chronicle a user’s
friends and family, creating memories that will last forever. These are examples which exemplify how important
open internet access is for today’s digital world. If technological development is a major goal
of our society, and if laying a groundwork for future innovation is a priority,
then internet access should be considered a basic utility – equally open for
everyone to access.

In
modern discussion, this concept is more generally referred to as net neutrality
– an idea around which proponents have gathered on both sides, either for and
against. On one side are the established telecommunication companies who
want to protect their profits by limiting regulation of their business.
On the other side, there are the supporters of net neutrality, who argue that telecommunications
companies, in the name of greater profits, will eventually force certain
internet services (for example: Facebook, Google, or Amazon) to pay for faster
service, thereby throttling speeds for others services who do not pay, giving
the incumbent firms an advantage over new competitors. Another fear is
that preferred access to specific sites will be bundled together into consumer packages,
much like television sports packages offered today, which come with additional
fees per month. Ultimately, the idea that internet access being curated
or tailored that would give preference to certain organizations, by grim necessity
means that other groups will – to at least some degree - be excluded. This
inherent exclusion would hamper future open innovation by creating a stranglehold
on the internet by the telecommunications industry, even more so than it enjoys
today. Even worse, this exclusion would
hinder those who seek to create new advanced technologies, which is required if
technological advancement is a serious goal of society.

Back
in 2014, two MIT researchers, Erik Brynjolfsson and Andrew McAfee, wrote a book about something they coined
"The Second Machine Age"[i] -- a not-too-distant future defined by
an explosion of technical innovation and economic growth, primarily fueled by
the invention of the computer and, subsequently, the internet. They based
their concept on the industrial-era first machine age, when the invention of
the steam engine acted as a great enabler by propelling (often literally) the
developed world forward exponentially -- in terms of both economic growth and
quality of life. One key concept, they say, is that the boom did not take
place immediately after the invention of the steam engine -- it took time to
fully adapt to the new technology, through innovation. In just the same
way, it has taken decades since the advent of the computer for the services
which, up until today previously unthinkable, to come to market and be
commonplace. This is due primarily to
the dramatic increase of two factors in the last several years: computing power
and connection speed over the internet. Brynjolfsson and McAfee purport that the world is
soon approaching the start of their second machine age, heralded by the
development of advanced technologies like artificial intelligence, robotics,
and big data analytics. However, no matter how advanced any singular
technology is, the key ingredient will always be what brings everything
together, the connectivity. This key
ingredient, open internet access, paramount in bringing about the second
machine age.

This is evidenced in two
ways. First, open innovation is the
hallmark of the internet -- it would not exist, at least not in any meaningful
way, if the early pioneers were simply out for a profit. Instead, both academics and nerds-in-general
worked together to build something that benefited the entire world on many
levels. They did this by creating an
infrastructure that was open and could be sequentially built on – agnostic to
whether the development was by a commercial entity building a website to sell
things, or a group of friends setting up a beer trading discussion board. In other words, the internet benefits
everyone, and enables free competition among businesses by not placing
restrictions on smaller companies. For big
business and government to now try and somehow alter this basic tenant would be
an egregious attack on information freedom and the innovative power of society.

Second, most innovation is not done through raw invention,
but by combining technologies – combinational innovation. The steam engine itself did not single-handedly
deliver the world into the first machine age – it took a few decades. Through combinational innovation during the
first machine age, society experienced a drastic boom of technological
advancement and economic growth, and it is the same today with the
internet. As advanced as some services
are today, at its core the internet is not much more than the networks academics
used to share information in the early days.
Simply put, it will take time for innovators to fully deliver on what
the internet has paved the way for. We
have not yet reached the point of stagnation – novel products are still coming
to market almost daily that can compete with larger, more established market
offerings. As Brynjolfsson writes, “Not
only are the new technologies exponential, digital, and combinatorial, but most
of the gains are still ahead of us. In the next twenty-four months, the planet
will add more computer power than it did in all previous history. Over the next
twenty-four years, the increase will likely be over a thousand-fold.”

For telecommunications companies, big business, or the
government to influence what can and cannot be accessed on the internet would
be relegating it to the domain of mere entertainment, where sports packages can
be bundled and maximum profits can be realized.
But the internet has become so much more than that – it is now an
enabler of healthcare services, life/safety equipment, and critical
infrastructure -- every day becoming more and more a basic, fundamental
requirement of modern life. For these
reasons, it is imperative that lawmakers and industry leaders remain vigilant
to ensure that the internet remains open and accessible to all, as a basic
utility.

[i] Brynjolfsson,
E. (2014). The second machine age: Work, progress, and prosperity in a time of
brilliant technologies. New York: W. W. Norton & Company.